Millions of Americans are shocked, confused, or disgusted by
the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The bombing doesn’t seem to make any
sense. Military analysts have stated repeatedly that bombing alone will have
little effect on Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic's ability to carry out
the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo. Indeed, the NATO bombing has led to
a massive increase in the number of ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo - just as
predicted. In addition, far from weakening Milosevic, the bombing campaign has
immeasurably strengthened his hand, so that a democracy movement which two years
ago seemed close to overthrowing Milosevic has now been drowned in a sea of
Serbian national unity against the U.S. and NATO. The U.S. bombing has given
Milosevic something he could never have achieved by himself: an external enemy
against which all Serbs can unite.

What’s going on here? Why would the U.S. and NATO undertake
a bombing campaign which has achieved the opposite of its stated goals?

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE WAR

The most important facts for understanding the present
situation have been carefully concealed by politicians and the media.

Since the mid-1980s, Yugoslavia has been the scene of a vast
working class movement which threatens to overthrow the International Monetary
Fund (IMF)-backed ex-Communist government.(1) (Kosovo is an "autonomous
region" and Serbia the largest of the six republics which formerly
constituted Yugoslavia.) Since 1987, Slobodan Milosevic has been the IMF’s
strongman in Belgrade, trying to enforce IMF-imposed wage cuts and capitalist
restructuring against massive worker resistance, and organizing ethnic
atrocities and civil war in a desperate bid to forestall revolution.

In the face of widespread worker discontent about the lack of
democracy and a 7-day student takeover of the University of Belgrade in June,
1968 (under the slogan, "Down with the Red Bourgeoisie"), Yugoslavia
borrowed heavily in the 1970s and built up a huge debt to the IMF, which in 1985
topped $20 billion.(2) Payback began in 1980. From 1980-84 the standard of
living in Yugoslavia fell nearly 40%.(3) In 1984 strikes centered in the
Yugoslav republic of Macedonia broke out and spread to other republics.

Strikes and demonstrations continued to grow. In July, 1988
thousands of striking Croat and Serb workers "in a revolutionary mood"
fought their way through police cordons and stormed Parliament. They called for
"united action by the entire Yugoslav working class."(4) In October,
30,000 workers bearing red flags and banners proclaiming, "Long Live the
Working Class!" and "Down with the Fascist Regime" occupied the
iron works in Titograd and forced the resignation of Montenegrin Communist
officials, while in Belgrade 5,000 Serb workers fought their way into Parliament
to demand the resignation of the government.(5) Strikes and hyperinflation swept
the country. In December, 1989 there was 2000% (two-thousand percent)
inflation.(6) Over 650,000 workers from several republics went on strike
together.(7)

In 1990 the Yugoslav government under Ante Markovic
administered "shock therapy" to the economy of more stringent
capitalist restructuring designed by economist Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard
University (who was also responsible for designing capitalist restructuring in
Poland and Russia). The reforms at first seemed to be succeeding, but by the
spring of 1991 they had collapsed in the face of massive worker resistance.(8)
Clearly some stronger medicine was needed to bring Yugoslav, especially Serbian,
workers to heel.

DIVIDE AND RULE

The working class movement brought together Yugoslavs of
every ethnic background. The movement was at least implicitly revolutionary, and
it terrified the international elite, for if successful it might easily spread
beyond Yugoslavia and spell the end of the smoothly-managed transition from
Communist to capitalist forms of elite rule in Eastern Europe. As the elite are
aware, successful revolution and true democracy anywhere could well lead to
revolution everywhere.

As the working class movement grew, the Yugoslav ruling elite
increasingly faced a stark choice: either smash the growing movement or go
under. Rather than lose their grip on power, they decided to dismember the
working class movement by dismembering the country. The dissolution of the
former Yugoslavia in 1991 and the ethnic fighting and atrocities are parts of a
carefully orchestrated elite strategy to divide and destroy the working class
movement.(9)

The six republics of Yugoslavia were united under a
non-ethnic Communist government since the end of WWII. Slobodan Milosevic became
chairman of the Serbian League of Communists in 1987 and later president of
Serbia and of Yugoslavia. He organized the "Milosevic Commission,"
which in 1988 called for market-oriented reforms, and he "urged Yugoslavs
to overcome their ‘unfounded, irrational, and...primitive fear of exploitation’
by foreign capital."(10) Milosevic moved to destroy working class
resistance to IMF restructuring programs. With "near monopoly control"
of TV, radio, and newspapers in Serbia, the Communist government under Milosevic
began an intensive propaganda campaign to divide the working class into warring
ethnic groups, claiming that Serbs, the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia, were
under attack by Croats and others in the republics beyond Serbia. In every
republic, ethnic groups were bombarded with propaganda to set them against each
other.(11) Nationalist paramilitary groups were organized to carry out
"retaliatory" atrocities. Serb nationalist thugs were armed in
Croatia, while Croat officials armed their own groups.(12) Nationalist parties
representing various ethnic groups were legalized and received increasing
support.

Slovenia, the most developed of the republics, seceded from
Yugoslavia in June, 1991. A 10-day war followed which "instilled a sense of
discipline and national pride in the Slovenian labour force" and finally
enabled Slovenian leaders to restructure the economy.(13) Fighting broke out
between Serbia and Croatia, and atrocities were carried out to stoke ethnic
hatred. "The people carrying out these actions were generally not from the
local area. It was not a case of people who’d lived side by side for
decades suddenly deciding to kill each other. Neither was it an eruption of
long-suppressed ethnic hatreds, as the media make out. It was a well-organized
state policy."(14) Croatia, Macedonia, and later Bosnia-Herzegovina also
seceded. Serbia, Montenegro, and the autonomous region Kosovo are all that
remain of Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile the opposition movement continued to grow. In
March, 1991 a half-million marched on Belgrade, demanding the ouster of
Milosevic, and anti-government riots shook the capital.(15) In April, 1991 700,000 workers in Serbia—one-third of the workforce—struck.(16) In July,
1993 farmers blockaded roads and unions called a general strike.(17) In August
the government issued a 500 million dinar note—worth about $10.(18) In
September, 1993 the Bosnian Serb army mutinied.(19) Thousands of Serbs avoided
the draft or deserted. In 1992, only 10% of young Serbs in Belgrade called by
the draft reported for duty.(20) In 1995, only 6% of young Montenegrins called
reported for duty. Whole villages conspired to hide their young men.(21)

In winter, 1997 fifty consecutive days of massive
demonstrations demanding the ouster of Milosevic shook Belgrade.(22) According
to a former Boston Globe reporter living there who fled once the bombing
began, the same crowds are now in demonstrationsagainst NATO organized
by Milosevic, while the leaders of the democracy movement are all fleeing.
"[NATO] had to know bombs would crown Milosevic emperor for life."(23)

ELITE GOALS IN YUGOSLAVIA

To figure out the real goals of political leaders, sometimes
it’s necessary to look not only at what they say but at what they do. What
have U.S. and NATO leaders actually done in Yugoslavia? Through the IMF they
have imposed repeated wage cuts, devaluations, and massive lay-offs. They
supported a "peace process" which has kept that country in a state of
war for eight years.(24) They brokered agreements producing massive dislocations
of populations and the fragmentation of Yugoslav society.(25) And now with their
bombs they are driving people into the arms of a hated politician whom people
before the bombing had been trying to overthrow.

Milosevic has been the U.S.-IMF man all along. Bombing Kosovo
and Serbia is a last desperate bid by the elite to smash the revolutionary
movement and keep Milosevic in power. The targets of the bombs are the
solidarity and self-confidence of the working people of every ethnic group. They
want to destroy the working class movement and divide Yugoslavs into warring
fractions. Their goal is counterrevolution.

THIS MOMENT IN HISTORY

The actions of the U.S. and NATO are not signs of strength
but weakness. Acting through the Yugoslav elite they tried to control working
people with Communist rhetoric, with capitalist rhetoric, with threats, with
police clubs, with bullets, with "restructuring," with ethnic
atrocities, with civil war, and each time they failed. They rely now on massive
military force because they lack sufficient moral or political credibility to
achieve their ends by other means. They carry out these actions at great
political cost: their actions expose them as utterly without morality.

The world elite are willing to pay this price because they
know that much more is at stake than Yugoslavia alone. The last few months have
seen neighboring Romania, where workers overthrew a Communist dictator in 1989,
shaken by huge strikes and marches on Bucharest by miners and other workers.
Neighboring Albania has been virtually without a government since a popular
uprising in 1997. Russia, with its historic ties to the Serbs, is in the throes
of strikes and complete disillusionment with capitalist reforms. NATO air
strikes are no doubt intended to rally the people of these countries to their
respective elites and to tell them also, "Keep in line or you’ll get the
same."

Now when it seems at its moment of greatest power, the world
elite is actually very weak. It has no ability to inspire, only to compel.
People are bound to elite control not out of loyalty but because they see no
alternative.

What is the alternative? We should build a worldwide
revolutionary movement to overthrow elite power and establish true democracy,
based on equality and solidarity and the social relations of working men and
women of every race and nationality. This new world exists now, in the lives and
struggles of ordinary people everywhere. Wherever men and women treat each other
with love and respect, wherever people love their children and teach them to be
considerate human beings, wherever people support each other in the face of
attacks, wherever people stand up and fight for a better world, there reside the
values and relationships which are the basis of a new society.

***

Afterword: INVISIBLE WORKERS

To prepare this article I reviewed a number of current books
on Yugoslavia. None of them mentioned the strikes. Only one or two mentioned the
massive demonstrations against Milosevic. I also reviewed current left analyses.
The struggle of the working class of Yugoslavia doesn’t figure in most of
them. (One anti-Marxist publication from the U.K., Wildcat No. 18, Summer
1996, had some good analysis.) The information in this article comes almost
entirely from newspapers: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal, and The Boston Globe. The fact that years of massive working
class struggle in Yugoslavia is invisible to scholarly writers and also to the
left is a sure sign that we need a new way of seeing the world. DS

1. Yugoslavia was a one-party Communist state until 1990,
when one-party rule was replaced with political pluralism, and the Communist
Party changed its name to the Socialist Party.

2. For a description of the 1968 student strike, see Alex N. Dragnich,
Yugoslavia’s Disintegration and the Search for Truth (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), pp. 91 ff. Dragnich says, "The [Tito]
government was quick to grasp the threat to its very existence if the students
succeeded in making common cause with the workers." By the end of the
1960s, a "wage-price spiral" caused by worker insurgency gripped
Yugoslavia. Inflation was 11% in both 1969 and 1970. In 1971 the government
devalued the dinar by 17%. (New York Times, January 24, p. 21) For the
size of the debt to the IMF, see NYT, September 14, 1985. According to
the NYT, September 19, 1985 inflation in Yugoslavia was 76% for June,
1985 alone.

3. NYT, September 24, 1984, I, p. 2.

4. The Guardian ran stories of these 48 hours of street protests on
July 7 and July 8, 1988 (the quotes are from The Guardian of July 8,
p.11). According to the story of July 7, the striking workers’ banners
proclaimed such things as, "We want to be free in a socialist
country," and "Down with the government." Both slogans seemed to
indicate workers’ lack of enthusiasm for the capitalist reforms then being
imposed by the government.

5. These events are described in The Guardian, October 10, 1988 p. 24,
and October 11, 1988, p. 10. "Titograd" has since reverted to its
ancient name, "Podgorica."

9. Laura Silber and Allan Little draw a similar conclusion, though they
attribute the dismemberment of the country to a different rationale: "This
book shows that Yugoslavia did not die a natural death. Rather, it was
deliberately killed off by men who had nothing to gain and everything to lose
from a peaceful transition from state socialism and one-party rule to
free-market democracy....[D]espite the appearance of chaos, the wars have been
prosecuted with terrifying rationality by protagonists playing long-term power
games." Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (New York: Penguin Books,
1997), pp. 25, 27. The argument of their book, however, begs the question of the
key reason for the conflict: as a succession of Yugoslav leaders learned to
their grief, "peaceful transition...to free-market democracy [sic]"
was impossible, not because of the ambitions of individual leaders, but because
massive workers’ resistance to capitalist restructuring blocked the way.
According to a British diplomat on the scene in April, 1991, "while the
mounting industrial unrest in Serbia, the biggest of the republics, poses a
threat to Mr. Milosevic, any serious economic restructuring there would be a
greater risk." (The Guardian, April 26, 1991, p. 32.) Milosevic and
other ex-Communist leaders obviously preferred ethnic conflict, which
strengthened their hand, to class war, which threatened to pull them under.
Silber, the Balkans Correspondent for the London Financial Times, and
Little, a BBC reporter, avoid dealing with this central contradiction in their
argument by not dealing with the working class in their book at all, except in
the guise of nationalist mobs.

11. Many reporters have detailed instances of the conscious manipulation of
ethnic hatreds, by methods ranging from media propaganda to inflicting
atrocities. While analysts differ in the degree to which they attribute ethnic
fighting to active orchestration by government-linked thugs and provocateurs,
they are in agreement that "The fact that for several years nationalistic
media outlets closely tied to political leaders and parties bombarded their
respective communities with disturbing and often completely false images about
their ethnic neighbors significantly reinforced traditional patterns of ethnic
distance and ethnic mistrust." Cohen, p. 247. Cf. The Guardian, May
8, 1991, p. 8, which claims that "fear and loathing between Serbs and
Croats are intentionally being stirred" by political leaders.

12. Milosevic, it is known, has continued to maintain close connections with ultra nationalist
paramilitary groups and with such figures of the Belgrade
underworld as one "aspiring warlord" who goes by the nom de guerre Arkan,
whose irregular troops, the Arkan "Tigers," in what Cohen refers to as
"one of the most notorious examples of externally-orchestrated paramilitary
activity... helped fuel the onset of hostilities between Serbs and Moslems in
Bosnia in 1992" when they brutally "liberated" a small,
predominantly Muslim village. Cohen, p. 248. One expedient used by leaders of
the various ethnic groups to whip up ethnic anger and fear was to fire all of
one ethnic group from their jobs. Thus, for example, the HDZ (Croatian Party of
the Right), the party of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, in June, 1991 began
to fire all Serbs from a wide variety of jobs in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia,
stoking the tensions that led to war. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The
Third Balkan War, (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 77.

13. Bennett, p. 223.

14. Wildcat No. 18, Summer 1996 (London), p. 17.

15. Bennett, p. 145.

16. Guardian, April 26, 1991, p. 32.

17. Guardian, July 28, 1993, I, p. 8.

18. Guardian, August 13, 1991, I, p. 2. Milosevic paid for his wars on
Croatia and Bosnia by printing money, unleashing a hyperinflation which
"won for his country the world record inflation rate—313 million percent
per month—surpassing previous record holders Weimar Germany and Hungary in
1946." Silber and Little, p. 385.

19. Wildcat, pp. 20-21.

20. Glenny, p. 131.

21. Wildcat, ibid.

22. Guardian, January 7, 1997, I, p. 10.

23. Randolph Ryan, Boston Globe, April 4, 1999, C, p. 3.

24. The peace agreements, which legitimized ethnic cleansing and strengthened
the initiators of ethnic fighting, further destabilized Yugoslavia. "The
US, like the European Union before it, recognized Milosevic as key to finding a
solution, and turned a blind eye to his complicity in the crimes that were
committed in the prosecution of Serbian war aims....The settlement had the
effect of strengthening the hand—in their respective states—of the two men
[Milosevic and Tudjman] on whose shoulders the lion’s share of the
responsibility for Yugoslavia’s tragedy lies." Silber and Little, pp.
389.

25. For example, the US "tacitly encouraged" the ethnic cleansing
of 480,000 Serbs from Krajina in Croatia. Silber and little contend, "[The
US-sponsored Dayton agreement] represented the pursuit of peace through ethnic
cleansing." Silber and Little, pp. 383-384.